Wanna B: It just got harder to be a B Corp. And we’re embracing that.
Every day, headlines remind us what happens when companies put profits ahead of people and communities.
That’s not the company we keep.
As a Certified B Corp, Civilian is part of a global family of companies that prioritize community investment instead of community extraction.
Twenty years after B Lab launched the B Corp model (the B stands for “benefit”), there are now almost 11,000 of us B Corps across over 100 countries. Some of the world’s favorites include the Body Shop, Kickstarter, and Warby Parker; meanwhile, new-B’s include Laika Animation Studio of Coraline and ParaNorman fame and Merkur Cooperative Bank.
Instead of revolving around shareholder value, we B Corps are evaluated on how we benefit individual lives, society, employees, and the planet—impacts that are measured in third-party audits guided by rigorous standards.
In the wake of open letters from members, these standards recently got even more rigorous. B Lab now requires B Corps to meet “non-negotiable” standards in all of its seven Impact Topic categories:
- Government Affairs and Collective Action
- Purpose and Stakeholder Governance
- Justice, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion
- Fair Work
- Human Rights
- Environmental Stewardship & Circularity
- Climate Action
In other words, no leaning on carbon offsets, real or metaphorical. If a company says it’s working to protect the planet, it can’t exploit its workers. If a brand stands for healthy people and communities, it also has to advocate for the systems that make those outcomes possible.
These new standards compel companies to walk the walk in every department, improving the lives of their employees, holding governments accountable, and supporting the health of our ecosystems and local environments.
Here at Civilian, we’re actually embracing our own upcoming recertification and reflecting on why we’re a B Corp.
B better
Since long before we became a B Corp, we’ve had clarity, purpose, and a strategic mission. But being a B Corp gave us the framework and community that helped us elevate our work and get to our goals faster. And now we’re excited to keep leveling up.
Civilian was founded in 1999 as a marketing agency doing mainstream work; we did ads for car dealerships for years. Then, in 2010, we won the contract for San Diego County’s It’s Up to Us campaign supporting mental illness stigma reduction. More county partnerships followed, culminating in statewide work with the California Mental Health Services Authority to create the Know the Signs campaign. With Know the Signs, we showed Californians how to recognize when someone might be struggling, how to reach out and what to say, and where to find local resources—in nine languages. The campaign had a measurable impact, and it helped us see what thoughtful, strategic marketing could accomplish when applied to issues that truly mattered.
From there, our work expanded across public health and other public-service sectors, including environmental sustainability, transportation, disaster preparedness, education, and economic development.
We realized, Okay, this is cool—let’s really do this. We put all our poker chips on “marketing for good.”
By 2016, we were a B Corp; in fact, we’re a founding member of B Local San Diego. The B Corp ethos was a natural extension of what we were already doing; it was aligned with our values of continuous improvement and our conviction that the work of bettering the world is never finished.
Joining the B Corp community helped us find more of our people: businesses with uncompromising visions for the future that were asking many of the same questions we were. They challenged us, inspired us, and kept raising the bar. When one of us finds a better way forward, everyone benefits.
Meanwhile, B Lab’s standards became more than a checklist—they became a blueprint for strengthening our own practices.
We’re especially aware of this blueprint now that we’re working on our recertification.
The progress we’re demonstrating across all seven categories can be incremental; there are benchmarks we have to meet now, then at Year Three, then Year Five. B Lab provides a guide for how to meet these commitments in thoughtful, road-tested ways, aligned with global standards.
Take diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, for example—what B Lab calls justice, equity, diversity and inclusion, or JEDI. Through B Lab, we have a framework for assessing and strengthening our existing practices, from how we support employees to how we make our communications and services more accessible and inclusive. Combined, the framework guides span more than 1,200 pages and outline vetted best practices for JEDI, human rights, climate action, stakeholder governance, and more.
We love being surrounded by like-minded peers who inspire us to keep raising our own standards; it’s no coincidence that some of our most meaningful work has been created while we’ve been a B Corp. And we believe our best work is still ahead of us.
Of course, it’s never really been about the label. We’d keep pursuing our mission with or without the certification. What we’re proud of is belonging to a community that keeps asking more of itself. A community that reflects our belief that better businesses can help build a better world—and that the work of becoming one is never finished.